Doctors would love to study competitive eaters

December 07, 2005|BEN HARDER Special to The Washington Post

Ian Hickman, a recent University of Kentucky graduate, quit his job as a clothing store manager and recently relocated to Sterling, Va., so he could be closer to the action. Hickman, 22, plans to compete for cash and fame by bolting Buffalo wings, hot dogs, watermelon and other manner of victuals. "I just want to eat food and impress my friends and win money," said the 6-foot-tall 165-pounder. In the first three months of competition, he figures he has won a little over $1,000. Some medical specialists say they can learn fundamental facts about gastrointestinal physiology from people who can, as Hickman once did, eat 9 pounds of watermelon in 15 minutes. "I would love to study them," said gastroenterologist George Triadafilopoulos, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. He said studying competitive eating would help researchers "understand the mechanisms (of swallowing and satiety) and treat people in whom the mechanisms are not working." Which is not to say they recommend anybody do it. Speed-eating has plenty of unpleasant side effects, among them vomiting, heartburn, diarrhea and painful gas, experts say. Not to mention choking, stomach rupture and esophageal inflammation. Frequent vomiting can splash teeth with stomach acid, eroding enamel. Swallowed bones can injure intestines; inhaled food can get trapped in airways. Then there's eating far too many calories to maintain a healthy weight. A sport of sorts Arnie Chapman of Oceanside, N.Y., who is head of the Association of Independent Competitive Eaters (www. competitiveeaters.com), one of two main groups that organize and promote speed-eating events in the United States, acknowledges that in his events, well, vomiting happens. But he doesn't see that as a big problem. "Vomiting is a healthy way (for the body) to say you've gone over your limit," he said. Chapman said he knows of two fatalities in the past three decades that resulted from competitive eating. Both involved choking. One occurred in a bar. "Contests at bars, where people are drinking, may not be such a good idea," he said. An emergency medical technician is always on the premises at events organized by the two eaters' associations, he said. But that's not the case at contests put on by individual bars and restaurants. It appears that competitive eating has evaded serious scientific scrutiny. Several searches of a database of medical literature produced no results. David C. Metz, a gastroenterologist at the University of Pennsylvania and spokesman for the American Gastroenterological Association, suspects that studying speed eaters could lead to breakthroughs in treating dyspepsia -- pain and bloating some people suffer after eating a modest meal. Something in those patients triggers the stomach to send a discomfort signal to the brain prematurely, Metz said. Competitive eaters seem able to suppress the distress signal, he said, and learning their secret may lead to better treatments for dyspepsia. Metz is particularly interested in a phenomenon known as "receptive relaxation" of the stomach. "As the organ fills with food," Metz said, its muscles relax in response, "enabling it to swell." Compared with other people's stomachs, speed eaters' presumably "can tolerate a higher degree of tension before they get uncomfortable." Many sport eaters say they train their stomachs to expand -- guzzling large volumes of water or chowing down low-calorie foods, such as cabbage, in the weeks leading up to an event. Don Lerman, 56, of Levittown, N.Y., chugs a gallon of liquid, sometimes daily, in the weeks before a contest. But no matter how much they train, at some point all eaters hit their limits. Weight and training Last December, Lerman's 5-foot-7-inch frame carried 142 pounds. Then he broke his foot in a fall and had to wear a boot cast for most of a year. He stopped exercising. "I gained a hundred pounds. in three months," he said. "If you're going to a lot of contests, you better do a lot of exercise or diet in between," said Lerman, who's been eating competitively since 2000. "Otherwise, you're going to get as big as a house." Concerned about his weight, he decided in November to take a sabbatical from competitive eating. Some eaters believe that carrying excess weight works against them. Reigning national champion Sonya Thomas, a 5-foot-5 Alexandria, Va., resident, weighs just 98 pounds (see her Web site at www. sonyatheblackwidow.com). Takeru Kobayashi of Japan, the top dog worldwide, also cuts a slender profile. And while many people who are drawn to compete are overweight, "the thinnest people are the best on the circuit," said Ryan Nerz of New York, who officiates at eating events and is writing a book about competitive eating. When size doesn't matter Some events aren't about stomach size, eaters say, but about speed. Devouring chicken wings, for example, demands more of contestants' manual dexterity and mandible speed than of their maximum capacity. After scarfing down 5 3/4 pounds of wings in 10 minutes to win the recent contest in Bethesda, Md., Thomas said she wasn't even full. Other contestants also said the sprint ended before they could push the envelope. The challenge with wings, said Hickman, is stripping meat from the bones and processing it rapidly without consuming a dangerously large piece of flesh -- or worse. Thomas said she prefers chow, like spaghetti, eggs and oysters, because they go down easier. At a regional qualifier earlier this year, a potato skin lodged painfully, if briefly, in her throat. A week later, she had to eat through the pain to win the final. "Maybe women have smaller throats than men," she speculates. Stanford's Triadafilopoulos has another theory. When the muscles that line the esophagus initiate swallowing, they alternately relax and contract in a rippling pattern that pushes food downward. It typically takes 9 to 15 seconds for a swallow to convey food to the stomach, he said. This makes the esophagus the real bottleneck in competitive speed eating, with a mouth full of food waiting for traffic to clear in the tunnel. Some people can relax all those muscles at once, momentarily turning the esophagus into a hollow pipe. While Hickman looks to improve his art, others hope to steer young people away from the game, to prevent glorification of overeating, the last thing America needs, they say. "Food is abused by so many people," said D. Milton Stokes, a Bronx, N.Y., dietitian and spokesman for the American Dietetic Association. "It just scares me a little to see something like this celebrated." "The only kind of competitive eating I like to see," said dietitian Bonnie Taub-Dix, also a spokeswoman for the association, "is which one of my kids can eat the most vegetables in one day."